I'm ten hours into the PC version. I'm a big fan of immersion, for those of you who weren't around to read Felishanna's and my freaking fanfic from Lanys. I don't have any complaints yet, except that the Krogan characters get weaker in each game, and that shouldn't be allowed when

The person playing Felishanna Secretlight meant well, but was misguided in that she forgot that behind the game there were real people with goals and feelings, and so her character became a Fantasy Racism Simulator. That, I do not condone.

However, she also took the time and trouble to write short stories involving her character (very light on the racism there) and post them on the old Lanys board. That level of immersion, we had in common.

I've been through the main plotline of ME3 once. Steering clear of spoilers, lemme point out some good and bad:

Good: - This is not boilerplate Mass Effect storytelling. I take back what I said earlier about phoning in the plot. It gets much more interesting as the game progresses, and there are points where it's hard not to get emotionally involved.- Players are rewarded for playing the earlier games, in the form of continued relationships with some of the characters.

Bad:- Players are punished for not playing the earlier games. My savefile from ME2 was corrupted, so I couldn't bring it forward. There are at least two scenes in the game where it is mathematically impossible to prevent fucking terrible things from happening, unless your save file dates back to ME2 and you did certain missions in the previous game. If you didn't carry your game forward or ME3 is your first try for the franchise, well, brace yourself for a couple of really, really bad experiences -- and understand that reloading and retrying them won't help.This is in the Bad column because it's not the same thing as rewarding people for playing the earlier games. There's a baseline of enjoyment I expect out of my games, and if consequences for my actions within the game impact the outcome negatively, so be it -- I won't even reload that. On the other hand, if EA makes me

listen to the slaughter of an entire race on someone's radio while she cries in the foreground, culminating in the suicide of the chick I was sleeping with in ME2 right in front of me

, all because a dialog option was suppressed because I can't prove I bought their previous game, I'm gonna have a teensy problem with it.

There's a background point mechanism at work here, and you need 5 points. You get one point for hitting one of the renegade/paragon options in the argument with the admirals, one for rescuing Admiral Koris... and the rest require ME2:- Prevent Tali's Exile in ME2: +2- Destroy the heretic Geth instead of rewriting them in ME2: +2- Broker peace between Legion and Tali in ME2: +1

Having enough points exposes the option to hit the paragon and renegade persuasive options here. It also enables a paragon quicktime moment as Tali is falling, ostensibly to catch her, but I don't know because I didn't get one, and I can't find that on the Internet anywhere. In order to use the persuasive dialog option, you need like 3 tiers of Paragon or Renegade reputation. I had that, but it didn't matter because I didn't forward a save from 2 (in which I prevented Tali's exile, and brokered peace between Legion and Tali, but rewrote the heretic Geth).

Of course, a month ago when I was preparing for ME3, I found out that my 360's drive was dead, and I hadn't updated it to have cloud save capability (not like that would have mattered, go go no import from cloud saves...) so I rushed a playthrough of ME2 and had a fresh save.

Yea, I had that happen to me because my Xbox died and I bought a new one. So all my ME1 and ME2 saves went with the old xbox. I lost the fleet, even though I wanted all of them, so now I only have the Geth from that scenario.

I could care less about the storyline, the ME line was always overrated anyway. I'm more curious about the gameplay mechanics. The FPS/RPG mix and party system have been the saving graces of ME. If that's still good in ME3, I'm in.

There's a weight limit involved for your weapons now, so a soldier carrying a heavy weapon, pistol, shotgun and assault rifle now faces a pretty stiff penalty to power recharge time. there are weapon mods that reduce weapon weight, increase accuracy, increase damage, increase armor/shield/barrier penetration, etc etc, but you can only install two mods at a time.

Everything else is pretty much standard ME fare. Oh... running is forever now, there's no "sprint, run out of breath and stop"

Huh? Where? I enjoy a lot of FPS games, particularly TF2 =p Honestly, I haven't gotten around to playing the MW or BF series, but I want to eventually. I think there's a lot of room for improvement, but that's true for most genres.

I'll admit I've become much more snobby when it comes to enjoyment of games, though. Still, I'm not quite Joxur where I can't find the enjoyment in something, even if it's innocuous.

Anyway, some of what Vanamar mentioned sounds interesting. I'm hoping that the skill trees are more elaborate but I'm not holding my breath =/ Is the weight limit as annoying as it sounds? =p

Eh, there's a little more choice involved in the skill trees. levels 4,5,6 of each skill each have two options to pick from.

The weight limit isn't so much annoying as it is...restrictive. My soldier couldn't carry (for example) a sniper rifle, shotgun, assault rifle and pistol without suffering severe cooldown penalties, but since I rarely use shotguns as a soldier, I passed on the shotgun. I also passed on the pistol and went with a low recoil SMG instead, since it was lighter. I ended up having 50% faster cooldowns, so I was happy.

I carried a lightweight sniper rifle, an ultralight-mod SMG, a high-caliber pistol and a small assault rifle for most of the game. Near the end, I tricked out the Black Widow sniper rifle and dropped the pistol, and had -11% cooldown speed.